Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music

3. Indeterminacy

3 indeterminacy Indeterminacy is a collection of ninety stories that John Cagebeganwritingin1958.I’dliketoplaysomeofthem.It’sagood way to start the year. They always make me feel good, especially when the weather gets bad. These cds were sent to me by Leslie Spitz-Edson, a former Wesleyan student who took this class in the late Eighties. She works for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington , and recently produced the reissue of the old Cage/Tudor Folkways recording in a beautiful boxed set. I got them for free. You’ll notice that Cage reads in a special way. He tells each story at a different speed. Each one is one minute long. If the text is short, he speaks slowly. If it’s long—two or three paragraphs— he speaks fast. In order to make his lectures interesting, and not dull and boring as so many lectures are, he times them and talks in a certain way. It’s like music but there’s no beat or meter to it. Are there any other musics on planet earth without a beat or meter? Gregorian chant, for example. The rhythm follows the words. Maybe it’s a mistake to say this resembles music. Perhaps we should have simply said this is what it is. Somewhere Cage said he thought of it as poetry. Anyway, they’re wonderful stories. Let’s not worry about it. He told thirty of them at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958. To have an American composer come over to Europe and tell funny stories must have been shocking. You didn’t hear too many serious composers telling funny stories then. The talks and lectures on art and music you would have heard in Europe around that time would have been very serious, scientific, and analytical. i n d e t e r m i n a c y : 13 Cage’s stories are filled with ideas that tell you something about his aesthetics of music. For example, there’s the one about the people diving in an outdoor swimming pool and the music in the jukebox inside seems to be accompanying them, even though they couldn’t be hearing it. One activity doesn’t have anything to do with the other, but if they’re happening at the same time, there is a relationship or perhaps a non-relationship. That led Cage to thinking how one notices many things at the same time in everyday life. You walk down the street, look at the trees, see somebody , breathe, and hear the sounds around you. You can focus on many things at once. And whereas most music we know is made to focus one on itself—you’re supposed to sit in a concert hall and be attentive to some musical masterpiece—Cage sees that one can perceive many things at the same time. Indeterminacy is about so many things. The stories are written out. The sounds that go along with the talking seem to be random and yet sometimes they punctuate what is being said. The ones that sound like a metal spring are made by a Slinky! There are a lot of piano sounds, too, and a dog barking. David Tudor used sounds from Fontana Mix and Concert for Piano and Orchestra as accompaniment . He didn’t synchronize the sounds with Cage’s reading. They’re just in there at the same time. Cage claimed to be an anarchist. By that he didn’t mean that everyone simply does whatever they want to or does things in a shoddy manner. If everybody did whatever they did as well as they could, there wouldn’t be the need to refer to a higher authority. When he was at Wesleyan in the Sixties, he taught a course in which he sent everyone to the library to find a different book. The students used chance operations to generate the call numbers. They all came back with different books on different subjects, some even in different languages. Cage thought it was a stupid idea for everybody to read the same thing. He thought it would be more interesting if everyone read something different. 14 : m u s i c 1 0 9 I Ching In 1951 Christian Wolff gave John Cage a copy of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of oracles. A new translation of Richard Wilhelm’s German version had just been published by Princeton University...